Found footage was already on its last legs well before The Pyramid hit theaters in 2014, but director Grégory Levasseur’s one and only feature film to date is as good an example as any as to why the craze was run into the ground so quickly.
The answer is a glaringly simple one; because it was – and arguably still is on occasion – immensely profitable. Despite being bludgeoned into submission by critics with a 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and blasted by audiences through a 21 percent user average with upwards of 10,000 votes being cast, The Pyramid still recouped its modest $6.5 million budget almost three times over at the box office.
Some movies are better off staying buried, though, and this interminable slog is one of them. Then again, Max subscribers would seem to be in vehement disagreement seeing as it’s slowly been fleeing the catacombs of irrelevance to gain a second wind on-demand, with FlixPatrol revealing it as one of the fastest-rising titles on the platform’s global charts.
Cursed with poor lighting, sketchy CGI, a stilted script, and some downright diabolical acting, the story of a ragtag band of archeologists exploring a hidden pyramid that houses deadly secrets and questionable creatures is about as uninspiring as they come.
Somehow, for reasons we’re not sure how to explain, at-home viewers have opted that dusting it off nearly a decade after it took a pasting was the right call, but maybe we can put it down to the fact it’s a supernatural blood-curdler and Halloween is right around the corner.